The Foreign Service Journal, October 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2018 69 Although he built a staff of nearly 100, Holbrooke and his office had no real bureaucratic home and no clear role in what was then called the AfPak theater. He had few resources—General Petraeus, he complained, “has more airplanes than I have telephones.” He worked and traveled constantly, search- ing for a path to a political solution to a problem that he may not have fully understood. “A negotiated settlement with the Taliban,” Farrow says, was “the white whale to Holbrooke’s Ahab.” General Petraeus, however, wanted no talks until the forces aligned against the Taliban had a stronger battlefield posi- tion. When Holbrooke told him, “Dave, we need to talk about reconciliation,” Petraeus replied, “Richard, that’s a 15-second conversation.” The White House, and indeed Secretary Clinton, followed the Pentagon’s lead. As Holbrooke’s health began to fail, people close to him urged him to quit, but he refused. Farrow writes: “He felt he was the only one capable of giving an honest assessment of the harsh reali- ties. But beneath the sweep of history was a small human struggle, of ego and age and fear.” Farrow, who was pres- ent, provides a harrowing but tender account of the meeting with Secretary Clinton at the State Department, during which Holbrooke suffered the massive heart attack that killed him. When doc- tors confirmed his death, Farrow told Clinton, “He was the closest thing to a father I ever had.” With Holbrooke absent from the story, Farrow’s book loses some of its narrative drive and emotional punch. Even so, the sketches of figures promi- nent and obscure, based on Farrow’s own interviews, remain fascinating. These include Abdul Rashid Dos- tum, the ethnic Uzbek warlord whose U.S.-backed Northern Alliance captured Kabul at the beginning of the Afghan war in 2001; Husain Haqqani, Pakistani journalist, politician and ambassa- dor to the United States (2008-2011); Freddy Torres, a Colombian truck driver kidnapped by unknown persons in 2006; Sally Evans, mother of Thomas Evans, who joined the al-Shabaab terrorist group and died in an attack on a military base in Northern Kenya; American diplomats Anne Patterson, Robin Raphel and Tom Countryman; and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Farrow seems to assign more blame for the failures of U.S. foreign policy to the U.S. military than to their civilian political leadership. A mass grave in Afghanistan, for example, is described as the result of “a strain of post-9/11 foreign policy led not by diplomats, but by soldiers and spies.” In Somalia, a CIA decision to back a series of warlords against a coalition of sharia courts (which Farrow says were a stabilizing force) turned “a local nuisance” into “a terrifying new threat to international security.” In Syria, he writes, Kurds, Turks, the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian Defense forces (both rebel groups) fought each other, all of them using U.S. arms and air support. “This,” says Far- row, “was what tactics without strategy looked like: deadly farce.” The Trump administration, says Farrow, “concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority.” Around the world, “America’s relationships took on a dis- tinctly military flavor.” Diplomats who survived the State Department purge were disdained and ignored. For the Foreign Service, shut out of the action, watching the administration’s perfor- mance is “like being locked outside watching an enthusiastic dog tear up your upholstery.” Farrow’s prose is clear and strong, despite the occasional stylistic oddity. Colombia in the 1980s is “an Escher- esque tessellation of faction and violence.” A chapter on Robin Raphel’s travails with the FBI ends with uncon- scious parody: “She fixed her blue eyes on me. ‘I wasn’t doing the wrong thing. … I was doing the real thing.’ Robin Raphel pulled on her coat and stepped back out into the cold.” These clunkers are rare enough to be called unique. We all know that the plural of anecdote is data, and War on Peace has anecdotes aplenty. The book’s per- suasive power comes from accumula- tion—readers looking for analytic rigor will be disappointed. War on Peace will resonate with those inclined to accept its thesis; others will probably never open it in the first place. n Harry W. Kopp, a former Foreign Service officer, is the author of several books on diplomacy, including (with John K. Na- land) a third edition of Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service (Georgetown University Press, 2017) and Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association (FS Books, 2015). He is a frequent Journal contributor and recently joined the FSJ Editorial Board. The story of Richard Holbrooke’s time as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan during 2009 and 2010 is the heart of the book.